Tag: Nottingham Forest

Transfer deadline day probably wasn’t supposed to work out like this for the Nottingham Forest manager Alex McLeish. His appointment into the position at The City Ground hadn’t been met with universal acclaim, and it had been suggested for a couple of weeks that there had been tensions between the manager and the club’s owners following the dismissal of chief executive Mark Arthur and Keith Burt, the club’s head of recruitment, and suggestions that he was being railroaded into signing specific players. Whatever tensions there were seem to have come to a head following the farcical-sounding attempt to bring the Peterborough United midfielder George Boyd to The City Ground which ended in strong rumours that McLeish had resigned his position at the end of last month. McLeish has won just one of his six matches in charge of the club so far, not the sort of form that seems likely to get Nottingham Forest into the Premier League, which is quite clearly where the Al-Hasawi family, who bought the club last summer, see as their ultimate aim for the club. Boyd is clearly a talented player and has played almost three hundred and seventy games for Stevenage and Peterborough United and even spent six games on loan at The City Ground during the latter part of the 2009/10 season, but at the end of his medical yesterday Forest called...

It hasn’t been a terribly happy Christmas break in the Football League Championship, with two sackings immediately after the festive period which can only be considered to be perfect summations of the insanity of the hair-trigger nature of modern football club ownership. At both Blackburn Rovers and Nottingham Forest, managers have lost their jobs today for under somewhat different circumstances but with the same ultimate result, that of nationwide head-shaking at decisions which go against every instinct of what sound custodianship of a football club should be about. Though the timing of these two decisions means that they will be lumped together as one, though, there are clear differences between them – one of these dismissals has come at a club at which such behaviour has become something approaching the norm in recent years and the other at a club which was due to be ushering in a return to past glories with the arrival of a new owner during the summer. First of all, then, to Ewood Park and the ever-adorable Venkys, an organisation which has been managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat – frequently, it has rather felt, with something almost approaching a degree of relish – ever since they first took Blackburn Rovers over. Last summer’s inevitable relegation from the Premier League was the opportunity for the owners to run a clean sweep...

We continue our series of archive videos of the clubs of the Football League Championship with Nottingham Forest. Twice the champions of Europe, it has now been more than a decade since Forest were last in the top division of English but, whilst our selected six matches all hark back to happier times to some extent, we’ve left the European Cup matches that everyone has already seen a thousand times off this list. We do, however, kick off with one of the great days in the history of the club. Founded as long ago as 1865, it took sixty-one years from winning the FA Cup in 1898 for the club to lift its next major trophy, and this came in 1959 with an FA Cup final win against Luton Town. Our second match, meanwhile, is a home First Division match against Manchester United from 1965. Our next two matches come from the clubs real glory days of the late 1970s. Having been relegated from the First Division after 16 years in 1972, the club decided to appoint Brian Clough as its manager three years later, and the dividends of this became apparent when the club won promotion back to the First Division in 1977. This, however, was only the beginning of the clubs ascent. At their first attempt, they became the champions of England the following season, and our...

In June 1984, shortly after bringing Tottenham Hotspur its first European trophy in twelve years, Keith Burkinshaw left White Hart Lane for the last time. Greeted by the press outside the ground, he gesticulated over his shoulder towards the rear of the shiny new stand behind him. ‘There used to be a football club over there’, he is said to have spat with contempt. These words may even have been apocryphal, but they turned out to be more prescient than anybody at that time than anybody could have imagined at the time. Whilst many might contend that football in Englands revolution began with the beginning of the Premier League in 1992, the truth of the matter is that the formation of this league was in many respects the end of a story rather than the beginning of one, and if that story has a birthplace then we could contend that this was at White Hart Lane. The application of Thatcherism to our national pastime began in a working class corner of North London, and its champion was a Monaco-based property developer in his late thirties: Irving Scholar. Footballs decline as a spectator sport from the late 1950s on has been well documented, and Tottenham Hotspur itself declined throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Spurs had become the first club to win the league and cup double in 1961, but these...

A period of turmoil in the history of one of Englands oldest clubs which began with the untimely death of the man that had previously rescued it from the brink of extinction, Nigel Doughty, moved towards a new beginning this week with the announcement that Nottingham Forest – twice champions of Europe in an altogether more innocent age – had been bought out by a family from Kuwait. Within forty-eight hours, the manager that steered the club just clear of the Championship relegation zone has been sacked and a scheduled tour of North America has been called off as the club seeks to regroup with just weeks left before the start of the new season. Yet in amongst this story lurk some fascinating questions. What are the plans of the new owners for the future of the club? Who will be the new manager and can he haul the club up from its nineteenth place finish in the league table last season? And what does this take-over say about potential future trends in the Premier League? The three men at the heart of the deal are Fawaz, Abdulaziz and Omar Al-Hasawi, who reportedly made their fortunes in the refrigeration and air conditioning business. Most reports describe them as being somewhere between “wealthy” and “mega-rich” but, uncommonly for newspapers and websites – which usually froth at the mouth at the...